Most “AI stack” posts pad a list to ten items. This one is intentionally small: a five-person engineering team at an early-stage company doesn’t need ten subscriptions, and the marginal value of the eleventh tool is rarely positive. The stack below is the smallest set we’d actually recommend, with the trade-offs each pick implies.
The picks
The choice between GitHub Copilot Pro at $10/seat and either Cursor Pro at $20/seat or Windsurf Pro at $20/seat is the only meaningful decision in this stack. Buy Copilot if your team is split across editors (VS Code, JetBrains, Visual Studio) or already uses GitHub.com features that benefit from Copilot integration. Buy Cursor or Windsurf if everyone is on VS Code already and the agent loop is your daily workflow.
For mixed teams, a defensible split is “Copilot for the JetBrains/Visual Studio devs, Cursor or Windsurf for the VS Code devs.” The unit cost difference at five seats is roughly $50/month — not a meaningful amount of money for a company with revenue, but worth noting for pre-revenue teams.
What we deliberately leave out
We don’t include a code-review bot at this team size. Five-person teams have small enough PR volume that the human review process works without one, and code-review bots add value at 50+ commits per week, not 5. We don’t include a separate model API subscription because all three editor tools include model access in their paid tiers. We don’t include a “documentation generator” because none of the ones we’ve evaluated produce output we’d actually ship without rewriting; the AI-native docs workflow at this team size is “ask the editor agent to draft, edit by hand, commit.”
What boundary triggers an upgrade
A five-person team graduates off this stack when one of three things happens: weekly AI-API overage on Cursor Pro or Windsurf Pro routinely exceeds the Pro+/Max upgrade cost (move users to Pro+ or Max); the team grows past ten engineers (move to Cursor Teams or Windsurf Teams for SSO and RBAC); or compliance / customer contracts require audit logs and SCIM (move to the Enterprise tier of whichever vendor is in use).
What makes this stack honest rather than aspirational
Every product on this page is actually used at the price points listed. We don’t recommend the $200/seat tiers as a default because at $1,000/month for five seats, the math only works for the heaviest agent users; we name them as upgrade paths rather than starting points. We don’t add an eleventh tool to look comprehensive.